[buug] Backups [Was: Trapped in Upgrade Hell]

Rick Moen rick at linuxmafia.com
Mon Mar 8 19:45:45 PST 2004


Quoting Ian Zimmerman (itz at buug.org):

> I agree, especially as I am trying to find a way to back up my new
> machine.  I had a 4G DAT2 drive in the old one, it worked perfectly
> and saved my a**e many times.  But the new disc drive is 60G ...

What's cost-effective depends (obviously) on how much data one has to
deal with per backup set, among other things -- but, these days, if I
were buying a tape drive for home use, I'd be looking for a used DDS4
drive.

It writes very, very quickly to either DDS4 or DDS3 tapes.  Use the
former for high capacity and the latter for inexpensive media.

Capacities before compression:
DDS4:  20 GB
DDS3:  12 GB

When weighing alternatives, make sure you include to cost of media for a
reasonable number of backup sets for a couple of years.  One such scheme
I worked out requires 30 tapes for each year, and is detailed in my
"Backup Fallacies / Pitfalls" piece (referred to earlier).  When you 
include cost of a _serious_ number of rotational backup sets, DDS 
tends to look very attractive, relative to all alternatives.





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